Thursday, December 15, 2016

Because We Looked Away

The Oxfam report, An Economy for the 1%(2016), tells us that the
richest 62 individuals on this planet own more than half the world's population
put together. As you let this statistic sink in, let me throw a couple of
others at you. I don't often take recourse to images, but on the theme of rising
inequality, I can do little more than point you in the direction of this
graphic illustration I came across a few months ago. As visualisations go, this
one is staggering. I can't look at it, to-date, without a shiver coursing
through my body.

(Source: http://newsclick.in/wealth-inequality-india)

I'm almost painfully aware of the privileged position I
occupy in this country, one of the world's most glaringly unequal societies. My
education, the fact that I am not persecuted on account of my religious, caste
or sexual identities, my socio-economic position - pretty much everything apart
from the fact that I am a woman - all serve to insulate me from the horrors that could have
been my lot in what is a devastatingly fractious society. What is essential to
understand, and I cannot stress this enough, is that in India, to talk about
class is almost always to simultaneously talk about caste. The caste system is
our own special 'gift' to the world, originating as it does in this country,
and it is the single most bone-crushingly inhuman system of classification anyone
could have ever conjured. More, it is, as Babasaheb warned us decades
ago, premised not upon the division of labour (as so many caste apologists
claim), but on the division of labourers[1]. As
old as organised society itself, despite the many efforts of Babasaheb and his
ilk to demolish this monstrosity, caste lives on in India today, tenacious
enough to take on new forms as it cements its place in our urbanscapes,
resisting every attempt at affirmative action[2]
which seeks to create a less unjust society.

Numerous scholars and activists have written
about the 'spaces between' the India which looks a little like the one I am
fortunate enough to inhabit, and the lived reality of, say, the hundreds of
people who live down the road from my sylvan campus, on the 'rurban' periphery
of Ahmedabad, which is (by population), one of India's 10 biggest cities. My
campus stands in the middle of what used to be an agricultural zone, and is
surrounded by the tiny rural settlements of Shela and Ghuma. I walk my students
to Shela every year, when I'm talking to them about Gandhi and the salt march;
about politics-as-spectacle. It is the first time since they come to Ahmedabad
that a lot of them have had to engage with their immediate
surroundings. In all honesty, my own engagement with Shela only began in earnest
when I designed this module, and this is precisely my point: we curate our spaces
- sanitise them - till they become ivory towers, minimising any and all contact
with those that caste and class or religion have long colluded to 'other'. Why?
Because it is easier to, as Harsh Mander puts it in his searing indictment of
modern Indian society, look away,[3]
than to think about the endless structural inequalities which have made it so
that some of us 'have' while so many - too many - simply do not.

As Mander puts it, "many people
believe that inequality is an inevitable part of the surge of economic growth
and globalised technological progress. But in fact inequality “is the product
of deliberate economic and political policies”, of which the two biggest
drivers are market fundamentalism and the capture of power by economic
elites,"[4]:
this is to be evidenced world over. These ideas are the very bedrock of
neoliberal ideology, and taken to their logical extreme, oppose public
investment on the part of the State in all areas, ranging from healthcare to
education, and labour protection to the acquisition/clearance of land and other
natural resources. In India, Mander adds, the tax exemptions "of around
five lakh crore rupees" (to corporate houses, in almost every recent
budget) "could substantially finance India’s education, nutrition and
health care gaps...if India just stops inequality from
rising, it could end extreme poverty for 90 million people by 2019. If it
reduces inequality by 36 per cent, it could completely eliminate extreme
poverty," he writes.

Mander concludes that we know the way to dam the "surging
tides of inequality" which are upon us: a more equal society can be crafted by raising
and enforcing minimum wages, imposing wealth taxes, enhancing government
spending on education, health and agriculture, providing social protection for the
aged and disabled, building on our affirmative action policies for socially
disadvantaged groups to counter the travesty that is our caste system, and
ensuring basic necessities such as water, sanitation and other utilities to the
rural poor and urban slums.

However, this remains a tantalising pipe-dream
indeed, all the more heartbreaking because it feels doable, if only our governments
were more inclined to ameliorate the lot of their citizens than appease the
rampant greed of their corporate overlords.

[1]The
full quotation reads like this: "It is a pity that Caste even today has
its defenders. The defences are many. It is defended on the ground that the
Caste System is but another name for division of labour and if division of
labour is a necessary feature of every civilized society, then it is argued
that there is nothing wrong in the Caste System. Now the first thing that is to
be urged against this view is that the Caste System is not merely division of
labour. It is also a division of labourers.
Civilized society undoubtedly needs division of labour. But in no civilized
society is division of labour accompanied by this unnatural division of
labourers into watertight compartments. The Caste System is not merely a
division of labourers which is quite different from division of labour—it is a
hierarchy in which the divisions of labourers are graded one above the other.
In no other country is the division of labour accompanied by this gradation of
labourers," from The Annihilation
of Caste by BR Ambedkar (1936). Access sections of this text at: http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/index.html

[2]In
the form of India's 'Reservation Policy' in educational institutions and
government organisations.

[3]
See Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice
and Indifference in New India by Harsh Mander (2015) for more.

[4]
For the full article, see: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/Harsh_Mander/harsh-mander-on-the-rising-economic-inequality-in-india/article7407472.ece